During a trip to Hong Kong, I experienced a couple of inspirational machine culture examples. I have described them in a mini-series of postings and this is one of them.

There exists in Hong Kong a so-called Octopus card which is a small-amount cash card for payments of order a few Euro - in Hong Kong the valuta is Hong Kong Dollars, but you get the point. The cards are used in the subway both when a passenger enters and exits the sub, and the accurate amount is subtracted from the card. Nice! The card can also be used in some kiosks, museums, etc. But here comes the really beautiful part: One can get the Octopus card as a part of your Junghans watch. That is, when entering the metro, you turn your watch towards the sensor and proceed. Mmm ... easy-to-use pervasive low-key technolgy.

A similar system was introduced in Denmark ten years ago (”Danmønt kortet”), but for some reason netver really became a success. One very cool way of (re-) introducing this payment method would be to build it into existing credit cards such that one would have two ways of payment on the ordinary Visa-card: 1) The somewhat slow but secure credit card way with pin-code for large amounts and 2) the quick octopus way for the metro, the night-club line, the street-market and so on. I am told that Holland have such a system or is about to introduce it – cool lets get going. It would also be a major step towards one of my favorite ideas: The cash-free society.